King", features a young protagonist, an assistant pig keeper named Taran, who wishes to be a great hero in a world drawn from Welsh mythology. Entertainment Weekly cited Lloyd Alexander as a possible influence on Rowling when it named her its 2007 Entertainer of the Year. When Alexander died in 2007, his obituary in New York Magazine drew many comparisons between Harry Potter and Prydain and said that "The High King is everything we desperately hope Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be." The Dark Is Rising Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence (which commenced with Over Sea, Under Stone in 1965 and now more commonly bound in a single volume) have been compared to the Harry Potter series. The second novel, also called The Dark Is Rising, features a young boy named Will Stanton who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is in fact imbued with magical power; in Will's case, that he is the last of the Old Ones, beings empowered by the Light to battle the Dark. The books open in much the same way, with Will finding that people are telling him strange things and that animals run from him. John Hodge, who wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, entitled The Seeker, made substantial changes to the novel's plot and tone to differentiate it from Harry Potter. A Wizard of Earthsea The basic premise of Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus, 1968), in which a boy with unusual aptitude for magic is recognised, and sent to a special school for wizards, resembles that of Harry Potter. On his first day, Ged encounters two other students, one of whom becomes his best friend, and the other, a haughty aristocratic rival. Ged later receives a scar in his struggle with a demonic shadow which can possess people. At the beginning of his journey, he is overconfident and arrogant, but after a terrible tragedy caused by his pride, is forced to rethink his ways, and later becomes a very respected wizard and headmaster, much like Albus Dumbledore. Le Guin claimed that she did not feel Rowling "ripped her off", but that she felt that Rowling's books were overpraised for supposed originality, and that Rowling "could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn't one